Israel and the Middle East News Update

Monday, January 14

Headlines: ​ ● , in Rare Admission, Confirms Syria Strike ● Lapid and Livni Said to Be in Serious Unity Talks ● Lapid Pledges Not to Join Coalition if Netanyahu Indicted ● IDF Chief Urges Aid to Palestinian Security Forces ● Erdan: Israel Should Punish Abbas Over Gaza Measures ● Funding Shortage Leads to Cuts in Palestinian Food Aid ● Palestinians to Take Over Largest UN Bloc on Tuesday ● Smotrich vs. Ariel in National Union Primary

Commentary: ● Forward: “How President Rivlin Appeals To Diaspora ” − By Jane Eisner, Editor-in-Chief ● New York Times: “The Man Who Humbled Qassim Suleimani” − By Bret Stephens, Senior Columnist

S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20004 The Hon. Robert Wexler, President ● Yoni Komorov, Editor ● Aaron Zucker, Associate Editor ​ ​

News Excerpts ​ January 14, 2019

The New York Times Israel, in Rare Admission, Confirms Syria Strike Prime Minister acknowledged on Sunday that Israeli forces had attacked Iranian weapons warehouses in Syria. The rare admission came hours after the military announced it had exposed the sixth and final tunnel under its border with Lebanon, which it says the Iranian-backed Hezbollah dug, wrapping up a six-week operation to seal the cross-border tunnels. By lifting the veil on its campaign to curb Iranian influence, Israel appeared to be trying to convey confidence that the threats from across its northern frontiers were under control.

Ha’aretz Lapid and Livni Said to Be in Serious Unity Talks The and Hatnuah parties are holding serious talks on running a joint ticket in the upcoming Israeli election. Party leaders and met several times over the past few days since Labor Chair Avi Gabbay ended his party’s alliance with Hatnuah. Livni is reportedly not demanding the number one slot on a unified roster with Yesh Atid. Lapid reportedly sees unifying with Livni as the opportunity to win seats from Labor, and to pull ahead of the new party headed by former Israeli army chief of staff , and then negotiate to join Gantz in a unified bloc against Netanyahu.

Times of Israel Lapid Pledges Not to Join Coalition if Netanyahu Indicted Lapid on Saturday stated that he will not join a Netanyahu-led government if the attorney general announces an intention to indict the prime minister, even before the hearing process has been completed. Lapid and Gantz have faced calls from Gabbay not to join a Netanyahu-led government. of the party also said he would not sit in a government led by Netanyahu if charges are filed after a hearing with the attorney general.

Times of Israel IDF Chief Urges Aid to Palestinian Security Forces Outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reportedly urged the government to strengthen the Palestinian Authority security forces, noting they had thwarted a Hamas terrorist attack in the . In his farewell remarks to the cabinet on Sunday, Eisenkot said PA forces seized weapons and explosives in Area A of the West Bank. He said that the PA was working out of its own interests, and it was in Israel’s interest to strengthen the PA security apparatus.

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Times of Israel Erdan: Israel Should Punish Abbas Over Gaza Measures Public Security Minister on Sunday suggested barring Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from returning to the West Bank when he next travels abroad, claiming Abbas was “one of the main instigators of violence on the southern border” and contributed nothing to the diplomatic process. Erdan said Abbas was responsible for the ongoing turmoil on the Israel-Gaza border through his ongoing economic pressure on Hamas as he tries to break the terror group’s grip over the enclave.

Times of Israel Funding Shortage Leads to Cuts in Palestinian Food Aid The World Food Program has suspended or reduced aid for some of its Palestinian beneficiaries in the West Bank and due to funding shortages, an official with the organization said Sunday. Some 27,000 Palestinians are no longer receiving aid through the United Nations program since January 1 in the West Bank, said Stephen Kearney, the organization’s director for the Palestinian territories. Another 165,000, including 110,000 in Gaza, are receiving 80 percent of the usual amount, he said.

Jerusalem Post Palestinians to Take Over Largest UN Bloc on Tuesday The Palestinian Authority is set to formally take the helm of the largest bloc of United Nation member states on Tuesday, known as the Group of 77 (G77) and China. Abbas will be in New York for Tuesday’s ceremony and is scheduled to meet with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the UN Security Council president and other world leaders. The G77 has recognized Palestine as member state since 1976. The group was first created in 1964 to advance the economic interests of developing countries, but has since expanded to include 134 of the UN’s 193 member states.

Times of Israel Smotrich vs. Ariel in National Union Primary The National Union party will vote for its leader on Monday night, with freshman lawmaker competing against two-term leader Agriculture Minister . The far Right party, which ran with the Bayit Yehudi list in the last election, is set to hold a vote among its 130 central committee members at a meeting in for its leader and its list for the next Knesset. In a poll conducted for the New Right, the party founded by Education Minister and Justice Minister when they broke off from Bayit Yehudi, found that the remainder of the Bayit Yehudi-National Union bloc would get an additional two to three seats with Smotrich at the helm.

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Forward – January 13, 2019 How President Rivlin Appeals To Diaspora Jews By Jane Eisner, Editor-in-Chief

● Israeli President wants you to know that he is deeply concerned about the deteriorating relations between his country and Jews around the world, and he plans to do something about it. Which, in a surprising way, sets him apart from the rest of Israel’s political leadership. More surprising still, Rivlin seems to understand the despite the fact that — unlike so many of his rivals — he has never lived outside Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from high school in suburban Philadelphia, went to college and graduate school in the States, and even was Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Naftali Bennett, minister of Diaspora affairs, lived as a child in the United States and became rich there, too, after selling his tech company and making what the Israelis call his “exit” before entering politics. Both of them have repeatedly angered and alienated many American Jews who disagree with their approach to everything from the nuclear deal to the anti-Semitic attacks in Pittsburgh last year.

● But Rivlin, born in Jerusalem, never left Israel until he was 29 years old, he told me in a conversation at the end of last month in the elegantly appointed Beit HaNassi, the official home of the president in Jerusalem. And yet he has positioned himself as a trusted interlocutor between the two uneasy branches of the Jewish people — half of whom now live in Israel, the other half of whom live mostly in the United States. “I really believe we are one family,” he said. At 79 years old, in the middle of his seven-year term as president, Rivlin appears like an avuncular grandfather (albeit one in a dark suit) eager to share stories from his childhood in a tone both insistent and friendly. But he also has not been afraid to express opinions at odds with the ruling government, even though he and the prime minister are both members of the party.

● We met in his office, which doubles as a reception area, complete with chairs positioned for conversation and walls lined with books and art work, anchored by standing Israel flags. That morning, he spoke mostly about growing up in a family whose tenure in Israel predates the establishment of the modern Jewish state by nearly a century and a half. His ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe in 1809, directed to Israel by a rabbi who believed the Messiah was going to appear then. The prediction didn’t materialize, but the family put down roots, becoming the first Jews to settle outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Rivlin was a Zionist from an early age, because he knew nothing else. “My family were pupils of [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky,” he said of the leader who championed an aggressive, some say right-wing, form of Zionism. “The only way to express a Zionist feeling is to come to Israel.” This Zionism could coexist with a healthy respect for, and interaction with, his Arab neighbors; Rivlin was strongly influenced by his father, an Arabic scholar who translated the Quran into Hebrew. For young Rivlin, the Diaspora was an abstract concept — until the siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s war for independence, when American Jews sent support in the form of Nestle’s chocolate, comic books and bubble gum.

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● Government was an abstract concept, too — until the Knesset relocated to Jerusalem after the war. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, lived in the same neighborhood, and Rivlin and his young friends played football next to the legendary leader’s home. Religious pluralism was perhaps the most foreign concept of all. “For me, there was no other shul all over the world than the shul I prayed in,” he recalled. “It was according to the Orthodox idea. Not extreme Orthodox,” he hastened to add. Rivlin’s religious experience was so confined and traditional that when he visited the United States for the first time as a Knesset member, in 1988, and attended a Reform synagogue in New Jersey, “I was not only embarrassed. I was shocked. I never knew there was a synagogue like that. To me, it was not a synagogue.” He soon realized, however, that “it was a new Judaism. They were creating a new Judaism.”

● Rivlin described himself as “secular Orthodox,” a paradox only outside Israel. Orthodoxy is his frame of reference even if he doesn’t follow its rules, and in the past he was quite critical of the more liberal streams of Judaism. But soon after he was elected president, in 2014, he welcomed Reform leaders to his official residence and subsequently hosted a variety of religious leaders; his chief of staff is an ultra-Orthodox woman; he has made outreach to Arab citizens of Israel, both Muslim and Christian, a cornerstone of his time in office. This is how, in word and deed, Rivlin appeals to American Jews. His politics on certain issues — specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — do not mesh with the liberal approach in the United States. But his statements on other contentious subjects do. He was critical of the nation-state legislation passed last year that downgraded the Arabic language. He has delivered punchy warnings about the decline of democracy in Israel, accusing those in power of weakening “the gatekeepers of Israeli democracy” and of undermining the justice system.

● He has not been shy about criticizing authoritarian leaders in Europe, such as Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, both of whom condone anti-Semitism, though Netanyahu has embraced them because of their support for Israel. “There is no way that somebody will define himself as one who appreciates Israel and hates Jews,” he told me. Rivlin is fond of calling the Diaspora “the fifth tribe,” an addition to the “four tribes” — secular, religious Zionist, ultra-Orthodox and Arab — that make up contemporary Israel. At an event on Christmas Day (an ordinary workday in much of Israel,) Rivlin addressed the graduates of a program called Community, which aims to familiarize Israeli Jews with life in the Diaspora. In a conversation with the journalist Assaf Lieberman, a graduate of Community, Rivlin said: “Once you meet Jews and say ‘you are not Jews’ you exclude them and you can find yourself excluded. If we were to say to the Jews of the United States, heaven forbid, that they are not part of us, they could say to us, heaven forbid, do not be part of us. We must not get to that situation.”

● He is similarly adamant about relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, citing the egalitarian principles of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, 70 years old and still relevant today. “When we were weak those were our values. This is not the time to change it,” he told

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me. “Never has Israel been so strong as it is now. Why should we change our values? “We are not doomed to live together. We are destined to live together.”

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The New York Times – January 11, 2019 The Man Who Humbled Qassim Suleimani By Bret Stephens, Senior Columnist

● “We struck thousands of targets without claiming responsibility or asking for credit.” So says Gadi Eisenkot about the Jewish state’s undeclared and unfinished military campaign against Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon. For his final interview as chief of staff of the before he retires next week, the general has decided to claim responsibility and take at least some of the credit. Eisenkot’s central intellectual contribution in fighting that campaign is the concept of “the campaign between wars” — the idea that continuous, kinetic efforts to degrade the enemy’s capabilities both lengthens the time between wars and improves the chances of winning them when they come. He also believes that Israel needed to focus its efforts on its deadliest enemy, Iran, as opposed to secondary foes such as Hamas in Gaza. “When you fight for many years against a weak enemy,” he says, “it also weakens you.”

● This thinking is what led Eisenkot to become the first Israeli general to take Iran head on, in addition to fighting its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere. And it’s how he succeeded in humbling, at least for the now, Qassim Suleimani, the wily commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, which has spearheaded Tehran’s ambitions to make itself a regional hegemon. “We operated under a certain threshold until two-and-a-half years ago,” Eisenkot explains, referring to Israel’s initial policy of mainly striking weapons shipments destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. “And then we noticed a significant change in Iran’s strategy. Their vision was to have significant influence in Syria by building a force of up to 100,000 Shiite fighters from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. They built intelligence bases and an air force base within each Syrian air base. And they brought civilians in order to indoctrinate them.”

● By 2016, Eisenkot estimates, Suleimani had deployed 3,000 of his men in Syria, along with 8,000 Hezbollah fighters and another 11,000 foreign Shiite troops. The Iranian funds flowing toward the effort amounted to $16 billion over seven years. Israel had long said it would not tolerate an Iranian presence on its border, but at that point Syria had become a place in which other countries’ declaratory red lines seemed easily erased. In January 2017 Eisenkot obtained the government’s unanimous consent for a change in the rules of the game. Israeli attacks became near-daily events. In 2018 alone, the air force dropped a staggering 2,000 bombs. That May, Suleimani attempted to retaliate by launching “more than 30 rockets toward Israel” (at least 10 more than what has been previously reported). None reached its target. Israeli responded with a furious assault that hit 80 separate Iranian military and Assad regime targets in Syria.

● Why did Suleimani — the subtle, determined architect of Iran’s largely successful efforts to entrench itself in Iraq, Yemen, Gaza and Lebanon — miscalculate? Eisenkot suggests a combination of overconfidence, based on Iran’s success in rescuing Assad’s regime from collapse, and underestimation of Israel’s determination to stop him, based on the West’s history

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of shrinking in the face of Tehran’s provocations. “His error was choosing a playground where he is relatively weak,” he says. “We have complete intelligence superiority in this area. We enjoy complete aerial superiority. We have strong deterrence and we have the justification to act.” “The force we faced over the last two years was a determined force,” he adds a little scornfully, “but not very impressive in its capabilities.”

● Eisenkot seems to feel similarly about Hezbollah and its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The group had devised a three-pronged strategy to invade and conquer (even if briefly) at least a part of Israel’s northern Galilee: building factories in Lebanon that could produce precision-guided missiles, excavating attack tunnels under the Israeli border and setting up a second front on the Syrian side of the . So far, the plan has failed. The factories were publicly exposed and the tunnels destroyed. Israel continues to attack Hezbollah positions on the Golan, most recently last month against an intelligence position in the village of Tel el Qudne (also previously unreported). “I can say with confidence that as we speak Hezbollah does not possess accurate [missile] capabilities except for small and negligible ones,” he says. “They were hoping to have hundreds of missiles in the mid- and long-range.”

● That means Hezbollah is unlikely to soon start another war with Israel. Suleimani has pulled his forces back from the border with Israel and withdrawn some altogether. The resumption of U.S. sanctions has also put a squeeze on Iran’s ability to finance its regional adventures. Israel also thought it had won a reprieve of sorts when John Bolton indicated the U.S. would not quickly withdraw from Syria, thereby obstructing Iran’s efforts to build a land bridge to Damascus, though that reversal seems to have been reversed yet again. Iran may now turn elsewhere. “As we push them in Syria,” Eisenkot says, “they transfer their efforts to Iraq,” where the U.S. still has thousands of troops. Thanks to Gadi Eisenkot, at least we know the Iranians aren’t invincible.

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